Life with the Night Furies Chapter 22
Falling asleep next to a total stranger is hard, Rangi decided, but falling asleep next to this one is way better than falling asleep alone.
The total stranger in question was Anya Svenhunddottir of the Berserkers, who had just become Anya, wife of Rangi Hofferson of Berk. He had met her only once before the wedding, and he'd been nearly paralyzed with fear of the unknown. She had set a lot of those fears to rest during that first meeting, but he'd still had enough fears left over to cause him distress on his wedding day. Ironically, those fears had a beneficial side effect – they had kept him from focusing on the fact that a small faction of the Berserker tribe was trying to kill him and thereby negate their tribe's treaty of peace with Berk. He'd survived their assassination attempts, he'd survived the wedding and the reception, and now he'd survived the wedding night. He was still nervous about working out a marriage to someone he barely knew, but that once-terrifying concept didn't seem quite so bad now. His new wife had shown herself to be kind, sensitive, and generous; she was very pretty; she shared his taste for occasional mischief...
...and the low, heavy breathing from the foot of the bed reminded him, as if he needed reminding, that she shared his fascination for Night Furies as well. Thing One had invited herself to join them for their wedding night, and neither of them could think of a way to talk her out of it. She had promised not to talk to them or distract them, and she really meant it when she said it... but when Anya made an unfamiliar cry, the young Night Fury had leaped to her feet.
"Anya! You all right? He hurt you?"
"I'm fine!" Anya snapped. "This is normal... I think. Now go back to sleep before you totally ruin the moment."
"Please," Rangi added with a hint of urgency in his voice. Thing One was unconvinced, but she had made a promise and she really wanted to keep it, in part to make her human friend happy and in part to avoid a tail-smack from her mother in the morning. If both of the humans said this was normal, then she had to believe them. She lay down and curled up, but couldn't go back to sleep. Several times in the next half-hour, she heard her human friend make an unfamiliar cry and scrambled to her feet, then forced herself to lie down again without speaking. The sounds of a dragon leaping up and lying down on a wooden floor were plainly audible to the bridal couple a few feet away, so she should have been a major roadblock to marital bliss, even though she didn't say a word. But young Viking hormones had their way, the couple somehow ignored the long black distraction at the foot of the bed, and now Rangi and Anya were lying contentedly in each other's arms. They still weren't much more than strangers to each other, but they were well on the way to changing that.
"Maybe we should have gone with the public consummation after all," Anya whispered. "At least the human witnesses would just stand there and say nothing."
"That's the theory," Rangi whispered back, "but I've heard that, after they've had enough mead, those human witnesses start making crude comments and shouting out suggestions. My father was one of the witnesses at Stoick and Valka's wedding many years ago, and he won't talk about what happened, but he said it was a horror show for the bride and the groom. Especially the bride. Believe it or not, I think we're better off with the Night Fury." They heard a rumble of what might have been approval from near the foot of the bed.
"If I'd had a choice, I would have preferred no witnesses at all," she said softly.
"Same here, but sometimes we don't get to make our own choices in life," he replied. "For instance, I didn't get to choose to marry you. The chiefs of our tribes put us together. But I have no complaints about that."
"I'm glad to hear it," she smiled.
Then they heard Thing One leap to her feet with a low growl, her claws scraping on the floor, and this time she didn't lie down. "Here we go again," Rangi sighed.
"Thing One, is this what you call 'not being distracting?' " Anya complained.
"Sneaky person outside," the dragon growled. "Trying to be quiet, walking back and forth. No, two sneaky people. They use tools."
"Are you sure?" Rangi demanded.
"Yes, very sure," Thing One answered as she crept toward the door. "Let me out. I protect you."
Rangi reluctantly rolled out of bed and began fumbling with his clothes in the dark. "This time, I think we should do things the Night Fury way. But don't kill them, Thing One! The chiefs will want to interrogate them and find out how many more of them are still out there." The dragon rumbled in reluctant agreement. Her patience with these boar-headed, stubborn Berserkers was running short.
Anya wrapped one of the sleeping furs around herself, then pulled a robe on over it. "Are they still after you, Rangi?" she asked fearfully. "I thought your Chief Night Fury said he got them all!"
"The wedding and the treaty aren't final until you receive your morning-gift," Rangi told her as he felt around on the floor for something. He tripped over Thing One's tail in the dark and fell flat. "Ow! Technically, they can still stop the treaty from going into effect if we, uhh, if we aren't married in the morning. Call me narrow-minded, but I'm very much against that. Oh, here it is." She heard the sound of a sword being drawn. "I'll guard the back door. You open the front door and release the Night Fury."
Anya tried to open the door, but Thing One's head was in the way. "Back up a little bit," she urged her reptilian friend. Then she pulled the door open, and the Night Fury sprang out with a roar... that quickly changed into a snort of disgust. The dragon looked around with her superb night vision, spotted two silhouettes running away, and savagely pounced on the nearest one, flattening him in the dirt and sending his horned helmet flying. The other silhouette kept running and disappeared in the darkness. Anya began to step out the door, but her nose was hit with a foul odor and she stopped in her tracks. Rangi joined her in the doorway after a moment, still holding his wedding sword. His nose wrinkled.
"Yuck!" he gasped. "It smells like somebody left a herd of yaks to graze outside our door! Who did this?"
"I think this person can answer that," they heard Thing One snarl. "I got him!"
"Bring him here," Anya called. Thing One picked up her victim by the back of his collar and triumphantly dragged him back to the house. She didn't approach the door, though; she stepped to the side of it. Anya ran into the house, lit a lantern, and shone a light on the wriggling trespasser.
"Tuffnut?" Rangi burst out. "What are you doing here? What's going on?"
"It was just a prank!" Tuff said lamely. "People do that stuff to newlyweds all the time. It's no big deal. Now tell your dragon to put me down!"
"Not until we've gotten a full confession," Rangi said flatly, and folded his arms. When Tuff didn't speak, Thing One gave him a quick shaking, which rattled his teeth and loosened his tongue.
"Okay, okay! Me and Ruff borrowed some shovels and a wheelbarrow, and we gathered a bunch of dried yak patties from the pastures. We were spreading them in front of your door so you couldn't get out without stepping in something. It was just a harmless joke!"
"Well, the joke's on you," Anya observed with a smirk. "Literally! Thing One stepped in that stuff when she ran out the door, and then she used those paws to pounce on you... so now you've got yak-patty all over the back of your vest!"
Tuff made a disgusted sound. "So we're even now, right? You can let me go now, right?"
Rangi shook his head. "We'll let you go after you have picked up all those yak patties and put them back in the pastures where you found them. And after you've returned the shovels and the wheelbarrow that you 'borrowed.' "
"All by myself?" Tuff protested. "That's not fair! My sister helped me!"
"If you can get her to help you clean up, that's fine with us," Anya answered.
"Okay, let me go and I'll get her," Tuffnut suggested.
"If we let you go, you'll run for home and we won't see you again for a week," Rangi said. "We're not as stupid as you... think we are." The veiled insult went right over Tuff's head.
Tuffnut hung his head. "Fine, you win... this time. Ruff! Come out and help me clean this up, or they'll never let me go!"
"Why should I?" came a gravelly female voice from the darkness. "You're busted, but I'm not. They can't hold onto you forever, so you're bound to get free eventually, whether I come out or not. If I come out, then I'm busted too."
Rangi answered that. "If we hold onto him until the morning, then the chief will find out what you two did to us, and your brother has already admitted that you helped him, so you're both busted, no matter what! The chief is going to be seriously ticked off because the marriage and the treaty mean a lot to him. But he'll go easier on you if you've already cleaned up the evidence before he gets here."
"How do you know he'll go easy on us?" Tuff demanded.
"Because I'm his translator and his friend, that's how. If I ask him to go easy on you, he probably will. So... give me a good reason to ask him to go easy on you. Clean up the mess you made in my front yard."
After a few seconds, the other twin grunted in defeat and stepped out from behind a storage shed where she'd been hiding. They began scooping up the patties with their shovels and filling their wheelbarrow with them, while Anya held the lantern, Rangi held his sword, and Thing One prowled back and forth, growling through bared teeth and looking very threatening.
"My back hurts from all of this shoveling," Tuff complained as he finished. "This isn't how I wanted to spend my night."
"Yeah, well, this isn't exactly how I wanted to spend tonight, either," Rangi shot back. He thought he heard Anya giggle, but he wasn't sure. "You're just getting what you deserve, so don't complain. Where did you come up with this brain-dead idea, anyway?"
"Some guy at the wedding reception pulled me aside and told me it would be fun," Tuff answered.
"Who was it?" Rangi asked.
"I don't know; I never saw him before," Tuff replied. "But it sounded like fun, and he was right, except you and your dragon ruined it by catching us in the act."
"He must have been another Berserker," Anya concluded. "Did this guy pull you aside before or after they tried to kill Rangi at the reception?"
"It was after, I think."
"So there's at least one more assassin running around out there!" Anya exclaimed.
"But why would an assassin want the twins to spread yak patties on our doorstep?" Rangi wondered.
"It would be a distraction from... something else," Anya thought out loud. "Rangi, you were going to guard the back door, but you joined me out front after a minute. What happened at the back door?"
"Nothing happened; that's why I came to the front," Rangi said. Then he tensed up and raised his blade. "You think somebody sneaked in the back while we were all distracted out front?"
"...and the killer is probably hiding in there now, with his knife drawn, waiting for us to go back inside and lie down," Anya concluded. She did not like the sound of that.